Tales of Chinatown eBook

“No; canaries, linnets—­all sorts.
Isn’t it funny?” The girl laughed in
a childish way. “And now I think Ah Fu
will have gone in, so I must say good night.”

But when presently Detective Durham found himself
walking back along West India Dock Road, his mind’s
eye was set upon the slinking figure of a Chinaman
carrying a birdcage.

VI

A HINT OF INCENSE

One Chinaman more or less does not make any very great
difference to the authorities responsible for maintaining
law and order in Limehouse. Asiatic settlers
are at liberty to follow their national propensities,
and to knife one another within reason. This
is wisdom. Such recreations are allowed, if not
encouraged, by all wise rulers of Eastern peoples.

“Found drowned,” too, is a verdict which
has covered many a dark mystery of old Thames, but
“Found in the river, death having been due to
the action of some poison unknown,” is a finding
which even in the case of a Chinaman is calculated
to stimulate the jaded official mind.

New Scotland Yard had given Durham a roving commission,
and had been justified in the fact that the second
victim, and this time not a Chinaman, had been found
under almost identical conditions. The link with
the establishment of Huang Chow was incomplete, and
Durham fully recognized that it was up to him to make
it sound and incontestable.

Jim Poland was not the only man in the East End who
knew that the dead Chinaman had been in negotiation
with Huang Chow. Kerry knew it, and had passed
the information on to Durham.

Some mystery surrounded the life of the old dealer,
who was said to be a mandarin of high rank, but his
exact association with the deaths first of the Chinaman
Pi Lung, and second of Cohen, remained to be proved.
Certain critics have declared the Metropolitan detective
service to be obsolete and inefficient. Kerry,
as a potential superintendent, resented these criticisms,
and in his protege Durham, perceived a member of the
new generation who was likely in time to produce results
calculated to remove this stigma.

Durham recognized that a greater responsibility rested
upon his shoulders than the actual importance of the
case might have indicated; and now, proceeding warily
along the deserted streets, he found his brain to
be extraordinarily active and his imagination very
much alive.

There is a night life in Limehouse, as he had learned,
but it is a mole life, a subterranean life, of which
no sign appears above ground after a certain hour.
Nevertheless, as he entered the area which harbours
those strange, hidden resorts the rumour of which
has served to create the glamour of Chinatown, he found
himself to be thinking of the great influence said
to be wielded by Huang Chow, and wondering if unseen
spies watched his movements.

Lala was Oriental, and now, alone in the night, distrust
leapt into being within him. He had been attracted
by her and had pitied her. He told himself now
that this was because of her dark beauty and the essentially
feminine appeal which she made. She was perhaps
a vampire of the most dangerous sort, one who lured
men to strange deaths for some sinister object beyond
reach of a Western imagination.